The setting of this novel is poverty-stricken southern Italy under Mussolini's fascist regime -- but it could easily be any time, anywhere that the helpless and dispossessed see their very existence threatened by the powers that rule and own the earth. Ignazio Silone's searingly compassionate vision of the human condition gives a fable-like quality to this story of peasants searching for a way to stop the legal theft of their vital source of water -- a story that comes to center around Berardo, the untutored, hot-tempered young man who becomes their leader and eventually a martyr. There is no idealistic rhetoric in this deeply moving novel; instead there is a blend of pungent reality and earthy humor, of cutting irony and the unsentimental facing of facts, that makes "Fontamara" one of the major works of fiction to emerge form the social, political, and economic crucible of the 1930s

Translation of Fontamara.

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